Chương 34: Giant's Tunnel

Lloyd's eyes lit up with relief when he finally saw some kind of light after long minutes of stumbling through the pitch-black tunnel. He picked up his pace slightly, feeling the tension in his shoulders begin to ease. As he walked, he started to hear a sound — like water trickling somewhere. Though, to be more precise, it wasn't water at all but that same green slime, sloshing and gurgling somewhere ahead. And then Lloyd nearly reached the end of the tunnel, moving faster and faster, almost breaking into a run.

And when he finally stepped out into the light, he suddenly felt his body grow strangely light — weightless, as if the ground itself had stopped holding him up. Blinded by the sudden brightness, Lloyd failed to notice there was a drop-off right in front of him.

"Son of a bitch!" he managed to shout as he realized there was no longer any ground beneath his feet. Lloyd fell — though not for long. A second later came a loud, disgustingly wet sound, a splat and a splash. Lloyd landed hard, feeling the air get knocked out of his lungs. But the thick green slime he landed in cushioned the impact, and he escaped any serious injury — just an aching soreness all over and a sticky, foul-smelling mess coating him from head to toe.

Lloyd slowly sat up, wiping the slime from his face, and scratched the back of his head, only smearing more green muck into his hair.

"How did I not notice that?" he thought, irritated with himself. Lloyd turned around, looking up. At a height of about five meters he spotted the same round tunnel from which the green slime had been dripping, slowly, drop by drop, with a steady, rhythmic sound. That was exactly where he'd fallen from. He grimaced, clicked his tongue, and looked around, trying to figure out where he'd ended up.

"Where am I?" the thought ran through his mind. It was another tunnel. But even that previous massive tunnel couldn't compare to this one in scale. This place was unimaginably, terrifyingly enormous. Lloyd stood in the middle of it, feeling like nothing more than a tiny bug. There was a distinct sense that this tunnel had been built for creatures hundreds of times larger than any human — its dimensions were that fantastical.

The walls disappeared into the gloom somewhere far off, and the ceiling rose so high that Lloyd's neck started to ache just from trying to look up and take it all in. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Lloyd slowly turned his head to the left. There he found a dead end — a massive wall, making it clear there was no path forward in that direction.

He turned to the right, and there the tunnel continued — but, to his surprise, there was no darkness there. Strangely enough, every crystal along this stretch was lit, casting a soft green glow that illuminated the path ahead. This light, unlike the dim, sickly glow from before, seemed almost confident, as if the tunnel itself were pointing the way, leaving no doubt about which direction to take.

Lloyd examined the walls, where he spotted more round tunnel openings at the same height — about five meters up — arranged along the wall in an unsettlingly even row.

"Well, looks like I don't have a choice," he muttered out loud, getting to his feet and feeling the slime drip off his clothes onto the floor with an unpleasant sound. Lloyd moved forward. Along the way he kept coming across bodies — here, there, scattered throughout the tunnel. But unlike that first enemy he'd encountered, these didn't come back to life. They simply lay there, motionless, silent, making it painfully clear that they had died a long, long time ago, and for good.

Some of the corpses had literally fused with the walls, as if the rock itself had absorbed them over the years, leaving only vague human-shaped outlines embedded in the stone. But Lloyd didn't even feel the urge to gag. After all the time he'd spent down here, his body seemed to have forgotten how to react to such sights — what once would have doubled him over now only brought a tired, numb indifference. Lloyd continued on his way, carefully stepping over yet another body.

"Why would anyone build dungeons this massive? Where's the logic in that?" he thought, glancing at a corpse fused into the wall.

"Though I guess whoever builds dungeons doesn't really need logic" he thought to himself with a bitter, joyless smirk. And then, after some time, Lloyd saw something that made even him feel a lump rise in his throat. He'd thought nothing could surprise him anymore, that the dungeon had already run through its entire stock of horrors — but it knew how to keep surprising him. Lloyd instinctively took a step back, feeling goosebumps crawl across his skin.

"No, no, no, I can't believe this," he whispered, barely aware he'd said it out loud. Before him rose a mountain of corpses. A mountain of rotted bodies, coated in a thick layer of green slime, piled on top of each other in monstrous disarray. Scattered among the bodies were remnants of clothing, weapons, armor — everything left behind by those who, like Lloyd now, had once walked these tunnels searching for something. This mountain was enormous — roughly ten meters tall, maybe more.

The bodies looked as though they'd been lying there so long they had fused together into a single, almost organic mass, giving off a heavy, suffocating stench of decay mixed with the sour reek of green slime. Lloyd sank to the ground, unable to stay on his feet any longer, feeling the sticky muck seep through the fabric of his pants.

"How am I supposed to fight whoever did this?" raced through his mind, and for the first time in a long while he felt genuine, ice-cold fear sink straight into his bones. Looking at this mountain of bodies, Lloyd understood: with every step, the dungeon was making it clearer and clearer that he stood no chance against whoever ruled here, against the Boss of this dungeon. But strangely enough, for reasons he himself didn't fully understand... Lloyd slowly rose to his feet, feeling his knees shake....

he kept walking forward, deeper into this nightmare, toward whatever unknown horror was waiting for him beyond the mountain of the dead.